Seen and heard at CTIA - LBS: When will the time be now?

By
Joe Francica

Seen-Heard_LBS_Whenisthetimenow
Seen and heard at CTIA: A plenary session on Location Based
Services-When will the time be now?

At CTIA this year, a special panel session was convened to address a
question the companies looking to help deploy a location-based service
have been asking themselves for a while: When will the time be now?

Derek Kerton, Principal of The Kerton Group moderated the panel that
hosted representatives from several sectors of LBS.Here is a synopsis
of each person's comments:

Tim Lorello, senior vice president of TeleCommunications Systems (TCS)
presented his reasons why he believes the time is now.He thinks that
too many applications are now requiring a precise location.Even those
where precision is not required, user expectations result in
disappointment if it is not.He also believes that the high speed
infrastructure is in place and that commercial applications must follow
solid 911 performance guidelines.

Joe Astroth, vice president of Autodesk
Location Services said that the
value chain has consolidated and more companies are collaborating.
"There was never any 'killer app', Astroth said.He believes that the
key now will be to "location-enable" the existing applications like
short messaging, directory assistance, roadside assistance, and traffic
information that are already being purchased by consumers.

Jason Devitt, CEO and Founder of Vindigo
said that, "all of the
infrastructure is in place; all of the applications are ready.There is
a tremendous appetite for services like this." He said that with the
exception of Nextel, no carrier has put all of the pieces together but
that "the time is this year."

Rob Consolazio, Senior Director of Nextel
said that his company already
has over 30 part partners for location applications such as @road,
Autodesk, Cloudberry, UPS Logistics AirClic Mapquest, Trimble, Corrigo,
Descartes Datatrac, aligo, Televigation, Gearworks and others.Nextel
is actively marketing services and saw the opportunity over two years
ago.The challenge for carriers is to know when to get out of the way.
Nextel announced a new partnership with AOL Mobile that will jointly
market the MapQuest "Find Me" application over the Nextel network.
Consolazio said "the key is simplification."

Jocelyn Vigreux, president of TomTom
said that, "It's a good time to
ask ourselves this questions.We are finally hitting the convergence
point.The price point is acceptable to enter the mass market."